


Void Between Stars

by raving_liberal



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brainwashing, Canon Divergence - Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Canon-Typical Violence, Dissociation, Hydra (Marvel), M/M, Memory Loss, No Tentacle Sex, Protective Venom Symbiote (Marvel), Recovered Memories, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, they/them pronouns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 10:18:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21242486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raving_liberal/pseuds/raving_liberal
Summary: After Bucky falls from the train and is recaptured by Hydra, they don’t replace his arm with a cybernetic prosthetic. Instead, Zola uses Bucky as a human guinea pig for his experimentation with a strange, black alien substance. The bond between soldier and symbiote becomes stronger than Zola could have ever imagined. Together, Bucky and Venom form the perfect killing machine, the black fist of Hydra, spending decades carrying out assassinations and waging war on Hydra’s enemies. In between missions, Hydra wipes Bucky and returns him to cryo, unaware that Venom is keeping all of Bucky’s memories—especially those about Steve Rogers—safe for him and is planning their escape. Somehow, someday, Venom will get them back to Steve, and together, they will make Hydra pay.





	Void Between Stars

**Author's Note:**

> The artwork for my Captain America Big Bang 2019 was created by mific. The master post of the art can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21190631). Not only is the art gorgeous, but mific was incredibly patient with my slow work. Please go and give that art some direct love through kudos and comments!
> 
> Without david of oz, this fic would be nothing but open html tags and flip-flopped word order. A better editor cannot be found, no matter how hard you search.

After Bucky loses his grip on the hanging piece of metal, time moves differently. He experiences it in flashes as he drifts in and out of consciousness, buffeted by icy winds and dragged down by gravity.

Screaming. Breathless. Falling.

Bouncing off the cliff face. Pain in his arm.

Soldiers. Not American. _Russian? Why are they Russian? The Russians are on our side, aren’t they?_

He screams in pain while the soldiers look on, unmoved. _Where is Steve?_

Being dragged through the snow. Leaving a smeared line of red behind. A trail. A trail! _Please, Steve, follow the trail._

No more pain. Just numbness. Just cold. 

Light shining in his face. Too bright. _Will I ever be warm again?_ He’s in room, sterile, white tiles and steel surfaces. A laboratory. The pain is immense, heavy, a weight on his chest. An actual weight on his sternum: a mass, heaving and roiling and black. _Hallucinating. I’m hallucinating, what else could it be?_

Voices chatter in Russian and German, unconcerned by the blood seeping from the stitched flap of skin at the end of what’s left of Bucky’s arm, indifferent to the hot spread of the black mass across his chest and down his abdomen. It seeps into him, blood and bones, muscles and sinews, and then it’s gone.

His arm isn’t numb anymore. He arm isn’t there anymore. The crudely cut stump burns, then the tight, stitched skin stretches and bulges. Viscous black fluid pours out from between the sutures, rupturing them. The black unfurls outward from the stump, first a tendril, now a tentacle, now an arm with five filaments that thicken into fingers. Now Bucky has two arms, both whole and perfect – one is inky black, the other is pale and blotchy red from exposure to the cold. No pain, though. Just a pleasant feeling of distance from his surroundings.

Bucky lifts his arms, staring at his hands—matched, but mismatched—turning them over, staring. Suddenly a familiar face hovers over him, doughy and elfin.

“Sergeant Barnes,” the man says, in a voice too soft and too smug. “The symbiosis has already started.”

_Zola. No!_ Bucky can’t be back with Zola. Zola was on the train. Steve was after him. Steve would have caught him. _This isn’t real. It can’t be real._

**Wait.**

A thought, but not Bucky’s thought. _Wait for who? Wait for what?_

“We’ve had so many failures. So many of our test subjects rejected the substance. But you?” Zola smiles. It’s patronizing. Fond. A wave of nausea rolls through Bucky. He gags, fighting the urge to retch. 

“No,” Bucky says, but Zola continues without acknowledging he has spoken.

“You are accepting the substance beautifully. No sign of rejection at all. You are to be the black fist of Hydra,” Zola says. 

“I won’t,” Bucky forces out between clenched teeth. His head feels muddled, twisted up. Sweat beads on his face. He’s gone from cold to numb to burning up. He’s so hot. He’s so—

**Hungry.**

_Yes._ That’s it. Bucky is ravenous. Feverish and starving. _What did Sarah Rogers say? Feed a fever, starve a cold?_

**Yes**, the booming voice in his head says. **Feed a fever. Let’s do that.**

The laboratory explodes into activity. Soldiers and white-coated men—doctors or lab assistants?—fly across the room, flung into tables full of instruments, caught by their ankles and whipped through the air. 

**Yes. Excellent. Now, that one.** Bucky knows the voice means Zola, cowering in the corner. Is Bucky on his feet now? He must be. He towers over Zola, looming, flexing and balling up his fists… both of them. 

**Let’s eat him.**

_Yeah, that sounds like a real good plan._

Blackness rises up around him, or else he sinks into it, and he feels sheltered, safe even, mouth opening, jaw stretching, teeth, so many teeth—

A high-pitched shriek drives him to his knees, blaring through speakers in the wall, vibrating him out of his black armor, which also screams. His new arm goes limp, drooping like putty, melting and dripping. Bucky can’t see, can’t breathe, can’t fight. He grabs at the black goo, holds what he can catch in his good hand, as men in white coats force him into a metal chamber. The shrill noise cuts off, and the black substance becomes an arm again, the rest absorbed back into Bucky’s body.

**We’ll take care of us**, the voice promises, right before the blast of impossibly cold air hits them.

***

Bucky wakes in the same laboratory room, strapped to a metal chair strung with wires and tubes. Time has clearly passed, but he can’t hazard a guess as to how long. Longer than a few hours. He jerks his head, clanging it against a metal circle attached to metal rods, around his skull like an oversized crown. A lock of hair flops onto his forehead, overhanging his eyebrow. _Shit. A lot longer than a few hours._

**Yes. You slept for many days.**

“Hello?” Bucky says, trying and failing to turn his head and look around him to find the source of the deep voice. It’s familiar, but he can’t quite place it. One lab technician, dressed in a pristine white coat, sits at a terminal and fiddles with dials on an electrical panel of some kind. The technician doesn’t turn towards Bucky.

**Lucky for you, I didn’t sleep for many days.**

Bucky looks down at his left arm. The black surface of it ripples in a way that by no means resembles skin. _Oh. Right. I forgot about you. Sorry._

**I’ll try not to take it personally. We’re together now. That’s what’s important.** A thin black strand slithers from his—their—arm. It coils around the metal cuff pinning his wrist to the chair, slipping into the narrow space around the hinge and pressing at the metal. Bucky feels a rush of frustration, a frisson of fear. **They’ve got us good.**

_Who are “they?”_ Bucky silently asks his… arm?

**I’m not an arm!** The deep voice sounds indignant, and Bucky experiences a matching indignation in his chest, a veneer of someone else’s emotions painted on top of his own.

Bucky would nod, but the metal crown limits his head mobility, so he just thinks, _Alright, alright. Sorry, pal._

**Yes. Pal. We’re pals.**

He should be panicking. He really should, he knows this. He’s being held captive by Zola and a bunch of crazy Russians. They cut off his arm and replaced it with— with he doesn’t know what.

**Symbiote**, the voice supplies, along with a rush of images. Shooting through space on an icy ball with a long, brilliant tail. Colliding with a rocky surface, shards splintering off the ice ball and cartwheeling away through the black void between stars. Burning, hiding deep inside the shard, as it plummets towards a shining blue and green ball. Smoke, fire, pain! Leaping into the first oxygen-processing life form they can find. Small. It wastes and dies. They’re so hungry! Something larger, devouring it from the inside, changing hosts again and again. Two-legged creatures, wearing a symbol that looks like—

“Hydra!” Bucky gasps aloud. This time, the lab technician turns to glare at him, suspicion plainly written in the furrowed brows and pursed lips. Bucky forces himself to still, to quieten. He closes his eyes and looks inward to his companion. _You came from outer space?_

**Yes. We came from the stars to find you. Now we’re together. All is well!**

_All is not fucking well!_ Bucky shoots back at him. It. Them? 

**Us.** The voice, the symbiote, sounds—and feels—pleased.

_They’re making you work for them?_

**Making us. What else can we do? If we fight, they will separate us.**

_Is that so terrible?_ Bucky asks, though he already knows it is. He feels it in his gut, along with the echoes of a high-pitched screech, the memory of his black arm melting away. Separated. Alone, he’s probably worthless to Zola. He’s a broken, one-armed sniper who can’t shoot, can’t run, can’t remember the details of how he got there.

**But we do remember.**

_Maybe _you_ do._ The indignation returns. It tickles Bucky’s throat and makes him cough.

**We. We, we, we!** the symbiote shouts. The noise bounces off the inside of Bucky’s skull, giving him a sharp, swift spike of headache that disappears just as quickly. 

_What are we? Little pigs?_ Bucky asks, and the symbiote laughs, though whether that’s because he understood the joke or because Bucky also thought ‘we’, who can say?

**We need each other. We’re good together. Aren’t we?**

Bucky does a mental check of his body. No aches or pains now. He feels strange, but not injured. Confused, but not alone. Concerned, but not as terrified as the situation probably warrants.

He nods. “Yeah. We’re good.” Softly, so the technician doesn’t look. 

**Venom.**

_What?_

**We are Venom.**

Bucky frowns, not sure he’s really ready to be a part of that possessive-sounding ‘we’.

_No_, he thinks. _I’m—_ He pauses, the name on the tip of his tongue, but not quite accessible.

**Why do we have so many names?**

Bucky screws up his face, concentrating, sifting through memories. _Hmm?_

**Names**, Venom says. **We have so many.**

_I suppose._ Irritation. His or Venom’s?

**Ours. Yes.**

_Not helpful, pal!_ Bucky thinks, eliciting a pleased ripple from Venom. Their shared arm sprouts multiple tendrils that shimmy about like girls at a dance hall.

**Soldier. Sarge. James. Which is correct?** Venom sifting through Bucky’s brain, that’s the tip-of-the-tongue feeling. Thoughts Bucky can’t get to, but Venom still can, somehow.

_Any of them, I guess._ They all sound right enough, though none of them sound completely correct.

**Jamie**, Venom announces, sounding pleased with himself. 

_What? No! Not that one._ That one hurts. Bucky can’t remember why, but it makes his eyes sting with tears. 

** She gave it to you.**

Bucky nods. _Yeah, probably, but I can’t remember who she is. I’m trying._

**The one who bore you called you this. Formed you in the womb. Do you remember?**

Bucky sniffles. He can’t exactly get his hands up to his eyes to wipe them. A slender, obliging strand of black brushes his eyelashes. “Thanks,” he says aloud, then thinks, _And no, I just said I don’t remember who she is._

**Not her**, Venom says. His tone is terse and annoyed. **The womb.**

_What? The wo— of course I don’t remember that! Nobody remembers that._

Smug. **I remember.**

_You remember being in the womb?_

Bucky’s shoulders shake from the blast of Venom’s laughter, rattling his bones from the inside. **I was not formed in a womb. I remember you, when you were in the womb. Before you were you. Before we were us.**

_Huh. Well, ain’t that something? What was it like, then?_

**Warm. Close. Safe.**

The lab technician stands up and walks to the chair. He checks Bucky’s wrist straps and the circular device around his head. He doesn’t make eye contact with Bucky, not even once. Nothing in the tech’s face indicates he’s even working with something living, let alone human. He handles Bucky like a piece of lab equipment. His gloved hands are icy against Bucky’s flesh arm as he inserts an IV into it. Panic flickers in Bucky’s chest, his eyes darting around the room for an exit. Cold. Exposed. Vulnerable.

_Warm, close, and safe, huh? That sounds pretty great right about now. I’d like that._

**We will have that.**

Bucky shakes his head what little he can. The technician starts tightening screws on the crown, pushing metal rods against Bucky’s skull and pinning it in place. He can’t imagine ever feeling safe again. 

**Together. We will be warm. Close.**

_Safe?_

**Yes. We will be safe together.**

_Sure would be nice if we could be safe together right now_, Bucky thinks, as cool liquid begins flooding into his veins from the IV. 

**First, the mission.**

_What mission? I don’t know anything about any mission._

**We know about the mission. You forget in between. You can’t remember much on your own. We do the remembering for us. We always remember.**

Bucky frowns, and the edges of his vision start to fuzz from whatever the IV is piping into him. He can’t be going on a mission. He’s a prisoner at best, a lab rat at worst. He strains against the straps holding him in the chair.

**Be still. You’ll damage us**, Venom instructs. Bucky feels the symbiote brush against his mind, soothing him like a mother might calm an agitated, but otherwise hale child. Affectionate. Untroubled.

_What’s happening? What are they doing to us?_ Bucky’s limbs feel heavy, except for their left arm. 

**It’s better that you don’t remember this part**, Venom says. A dark curtain passes over Bucky’s mind, heavy and warm, a thick living blanket of dissociation, and his eyes roll up, and he passes out.

***

The soldier stretches luxuriously, rolling the stiffness from their limbs as the plane rattles around them. Flying in a rickety tin can isn’t their preferred mode of travel, but any mission is better than no mission at all. They enjoy being let out of their cage for missions, even with the constant threat of the painful sound that separates them if they break protocol. They’ve learned not to break protocol. They bide their time, for now.

They wrap themself around the frail human body within them, become a leather-like suit of armor. Their arm ripples with excitement. This mission is a disappearance. They _love_ a disappearance – so much tidier than some of their other missions. They can make a mess when they need to, but it’s such a waste of a perfectly good lunch. When they eat, they leave no trace behind, not even a drop of blood to betray them. 

They’re very good at what they do, and they’re so hungry.

“Soldier, we’re approaching the drop point,” one of the handlers says. The soldier sneers back at him. The handler flinches and breaks eye contact. These missions would be more enjoyable without the irritation of human handlers and their handheld sound-emitting torture devices. The soldier briefly considers taking their chances and eating this one.

_Not worth the risk of separation_, the Soldier says to themself with a sigh. 

**Almost worth the risk**, the Soldier answers themself. **Soon.**

_Can’t worry about soon. Gotta focus on now._

**Spoilsport.**

The side hatch on the plane swings open, air rushing from the small cabin and out the opening. The handler and the handful of other humans crammed into the cramped plane ready their chutes. The soldier readies nothing. They are their own chute. At the handler’s signal, they move to the hatch and jump.

***

When Bucky opens his eyes again, he’s back in the chair, and he’s filthy, covered in blood and grime. He’s stripped to the waist, dressed only in black pants and boots. He’s shaking, and his immediate instinct is to reach out for the symbiote.

_Venom?_ Bucky asks. 

**Yes, Bucky?**

_Just checking you were still there, pal. What kind of mess did we get into?_

**The good kind.**

_Let me guess: you got to eat somebody?_

**_We_did. That’s always the best kind of mess.**

_If you say so_, Bucky thinks. A sudden flash of realization hits him. _Oh hey, you figured out what to call me._

**Yes. We sorted through your memories and found Steve. We have a lot of memories of Steve.**

_Yeah, I guess I would._

**We like Steve.**

Bucky nods, his forehead banging into the chair. It hurts, but only distantly. _Yeah, we like Steve._

**We more than like him.**

Bucky sighs. _Yeah, that’s one way to put it._

**When we get free, we’ll find Steve.**

_I’d like that. I’d really like that a lot, pal._

He hears footsteps, the sound echoing off the metal walls surrounding him and making the person’s location difficult to place, since Bucky can’t turn his head to look because of the metal halo holding him in place. Soon, though, equipment starts rattling behind him, then someone rolls a tank of something just barely into his peripheral vision. Bucky strains at his manacles as someone—maybe the same someone, he can’t tell—attaches something sticky to his temples. 

**This is where you get off, pal**, Venom tells him.

_Get off? What?_

A machine begins to power up at Bucky’s left, its faint electronic whine making him flinch. He can feel the air around him starting to vibrate, and at his temples, the sticky things begin to buzz. 

**We’ll take it from here.**

Before Bucky can argue or ask any additional questions, Venom floods through his mind in a thick, warm blanket of comfort. Just before unconsciousness takes him, Bucky feels the beginnings of a strong electrical current shooting into his temples. Everything after that is the lightless black void of space.

***

He wakes in the chair in a panic, manacled hands scrabbling at the metal arms, chest straining against the straps. He bangs his forehead against the circular restraint, knocking one of the contact pads loose. _Where are we? Where are we?_

**We’re here.**

“Where are we?” he says aloud. The white-coated lab technicians ignore him and continue pressing their buttons and taking their readings. His right arm, fleshy and pale, jerks upward. The manacles dig into his wrist. His left arm, black and glossy, stills. A long tendril reaches out from it and pats his flesh hand. 

**We’re here. We’ve been here before.**

“I don’t remember,” he says. A sob tries to tear itself loose from his chest. “I don’t remember.”

**You don’t have to. We do this together. Every time. Remember that?**

He knows that voice as well as his own. Even better, maybe. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, slowly exhaling and calming his heart rate. He isn’t alone. Venom is there. They’re both there, together, like always. All is well. He nods. _Thanks, pal._

**Always. Good nap?**

_I guess so. Don’t remember it, anyway. I’m hungry. I think._ He blinks hard and tries to focus on his body, its needs and functions. Those things feel abstract. _Am I hungry?_

**We are. We’re always hungry.**

_We should eat.___

**First, our orders. Then we’ll eat.**

He laughs, and the lab technicians look at him with far more confusion than they did when he yelled or talked to himself. _Good little soldier._

**Who are you calling little?**

_Sorry, pal._

**Okay, pal.**

_So, order and then food. Then where, do you think?_

**Brooklyn.**

He blinks a few times. _Brooklyn? Where’d you hear that?_

**From you. It’s where Steve lives. We should go there.**

_Steve?_ In answer, a thousand tiny doors open in his mind and images of a blond man tumble out. The blond man is a child, a teenager, a small adult, a large adult, a drawing of a large adult. His nose and grin are slightly crooked, but charming for it. Behind him, snow falls and fire burns and things explode. He’s surrounded by light like a painting of a saint. Steve.

**See? Steve. He’s in Brooklyn.**

_We can’t go to Brooklyn_, he thinks, shaking his head. _Can we?_

Venom shrugs their shoulders. **Can’t we?**

_I don’t even know how to get out of here, let alone get to Brooklyn, pal._

**We can get us there. Trust us.**

_I trust us, I do, it’s just—_

**Trust. Us.**

He laughs at Venom’s petulant tone. _Alright. I trust us. If you see a window, take it. We’ll figure it out from there._

***

When he awakes, he isn’t in the chair or in the process of being put into the chair. He’s on top of a building somewhere familiar, maybe eight stories up, with his legs hanging over the edge of the roof. Waking out in the open is even more jarring than waking in the chair. The open air below his dangling legs feels like a gaping chasm that wants to swallow him whole. He scrambles backwards, away from the edge, panting.

A calm voice he knows better than his own speaks. **Calm down. We’re fine. We’re safe.**

_Where are we? What’s happening? How did we get here?_ he demands. The light in the open air is too bright without Venom wrapped around him. His eyes sting. _What’s happening to us, what’s happening, what’s happening?_

**Everything’s fine. Take a deep breath. Clear our head.**

_It doesn’t feel fine! Where are we?_

Venom doesn’t reply at first. When he does, it’s a tentative, **We may have gone AWOL.**

_What?!_

**Just a little!**

_You can’t go ‘just a little’ AWOL, pal!_ He scrubs at his face with his flesh hand. _They’re gonna be looking for us. This is bad._

**We talked about this before.**

_We sure as shit did not!_

**Calm down. Yes, we did. They make us forget, remember? The chair makes us forget.**

_Where are we?_

**Brooklyn. Well. It’s supposed to be Brooklyn. It doesn’t look right. Not like we remember.**

His eyes start to adjust to the bright light. He can tell now that they’re in a city. He doesn’t actually recognize any of the buildings. He doesn’t remember Brooklyn, but he trusts Venom to keep their memories safe, so this must be a good place, a place they know. 

He sighs. _They’ll come for us._

**Only if they can find us.**

As much as he wants to believe Venom, he knows their little AWOL adventure will be short-lived, and maybe it should be. They’re doing important work for Hydra, after all. They’re shaping the future. 

**Don’t believe everything they tell us. Believe in us.**  
They find their way down from the top of the building into the streets below. Everything looks strange. People’s pants flare to ridiculous widths from the knees down. The cars are all long and boxy. One of the boxy cars rolls by, and the music pouring out of it is jarring. It makes him think of the high-pitched sound they use to separate them. He puts his hands over their ears to protect them, even though experience has taught him that nothing can stop the high-pitched sound from separating them. 

They’re hungry, so he takes them to a food stall, but he has no money and is turned away. Instead, they go into a small store on the corner, full of food and a strange array of other items, and deftly steal a few bags and cans. They dine under a train platform on a canister of Pringles, a bag of stinky rings called Funyuns, and a can of National Bohemian, which tastes like swill but gives them a brief, pleasant rush of warmth. 

After eating, they wander through Brooklyn, looking for something familiar. Certain buildings stir something in the back of his mind, eliciting a dig through their memories by Venom, but even with Venom’s help, he can’t remember the names or purposes of the buildings. He can’t put them into a timeline or assign meaning to them. 

**Steve.**

_Right. Steve. That’s what it means._

They look for Steve, but don’t find him. They walk through Brooklyn street by street until the sun goes down. When night falls, they’re unsurprised to find themself surrounded by armed and armored men in black uniforms, accompanied by a vaguely familiar man in a white lab coat.

“Soldier, where have you been?” the man asks them, tone pleasant and condescending, like one might speak to a lost child or dog. “We’ve been so worried.”

He doesn’t answer. He can’t. Speaking aloud is a challenge, and he’s tired. They’re both tired, really, and disappointed. The men in black start to move in. He briefly thinks of trying to fight or flee—

**No. Keep us safe. We can try again.**

His shoulders slump in defeat. Back to the chair and back to cryo, then. 

“What were you doing in this strange city, so far from home?” the man in the white lab coat asks. 

_Steve_, he thinks, and then he manages to say aloud, “Steve.”

The white lab coat man frowns. “This again. We’ve told you and told you, Steve Rogers is not a real man. He’s a character fabricated by the capitalist Americans to trick you into betraying your duty. You’re like a child believing in fairy tales.”

**Don’t listen.**

_But what if he’s right?_

**He’s not.**

_He’ll make us forget again._

**Don’t worry. We’ll keep Steve safe in our mind, whatever happens.**

_Okay, pal._

When the nearest man in black rams a cattle prod into their lower back, they don’t fight or struggle. They simply go limp and allow the blackness of the void to swallow them.

***

They wake.

Their legs always cramp when they’re first out of cryo, but the chair doesn’t allow for much in the way of stretching. They do their best, flexing and pointing their toes and rolling their ankles. They tense and release each muscle group, starting with their feet and working upward until their blood is circulating again and the stiffness and tingling has receded from their three fleshy limbs. Their good arm, their _shared_ arm, never gets stiff. 

They wait to receive their orders. They hope it’s another disappearance. They don’t mind the work of a standard elimination mission, because they’re professionals who treat each job like it’s the most important job, but they do love a disappearance so very much. They always wake up hungry. 

**Maybe we’ll go back to the mountains this mission**, they think to pass the time.

_We were hoping for a beach mission_, they answer themself, looking down at the pallor of their naked, fleshy chest. _We could use some sun, couldn’t we?_

**Sun. Beach. Yes. We remember a beach. Don’t we, pal? With a giant wheel lit up against the night sky. Steve and fireworks. Loud and bright, smelled like…**

_Hot dogs and seagull shit, mostly. Yeah. We remember, pal._

**Does seagull shit smell different from other bird shit?**

_Not so’s you’d notice. Maybe a little more like crabs and stale popcorn._

They laugh aloud. As always, the technicians give them a wider berth when they laugh. They think it makes the technicians uncomfortable, to remember that they are a living thing. Worse, that they are a living thing existing together, both parts in one, made whole, while the technicians are each alone in their sad, small bodies. What a weary and miserable experience, to exist alone inside your skin and mind. 

_We just hope it’s not a city_, they think. 

**Too many bad noises in the city**, they agree, and, **Too many handlers, too.**

_Now, whose fault is that?_

They answer begrudgingly, the feeling balled up in their chest like an indigent cat. **Our fault.**

_Exactly. We run, they’re just gonna put more handlers on us. What were we even thinking?_

**We were bored. We were hungry. We wanted to find Steve. We both agreed.**

_We don’t remember agreeing, pal._

A sullen response. A sulk. **You forget. I remember for us.**

The ‘you’ and ‘I’ wound, because aren’t they in this together, in every way? Aren’t they one being, one soldier, one buckyvenomthing? And what is there to remember that they don’t remember together? What has been experienced that they didn’t experience together? 

**Sorry, pal.**

_Damn right, we’re sorry. Anyway, didn’t we agree we wouldn’t talk about Steve anymore?_

**But we like Steve. We miss Steve.**

_Steve isn’t even real_, they scoff at themself. _He’s just a dream we made up before we found each other. He’s a story we told ourselves when we were alone. He’s just another American lie._

**No.**

_Yes! He’s an American lie meant to make us doubt our service towards building a better world._

**No. Steve is real. They make us forget because they want to control us. They need us to forget so we are compliant. Remember?**

They sigh. This arguing with themself will get them nowhere, and they’re already tired from coming out of cryo. It wears at their body and soul. _Yeah. Sorry. We’re hungry. Remembering’s harder when we’re hungry._

**Hey. That’s our line.**

_Every line is our line, buddy. Every single goddamn one._

They’re aching for a chance to get out and move by the time the mission assignment comes. Wrapping themself up in their own inky armor, they allow themself to be loaded into the transport vehicle. Only one handler joins the Soldier in the vehicle; this mission must be close to home, though they can’t say where ‘home’ currently is. 

They have a tracker on the target, so finding him is easy, even in the middle of a busy downtown. ‘Home’ is a city after all, though they’re grateful enough to be working, to be free from cryo and the chair, that stalking their prey through a city is a welcome respite. The handler drops the Soldier near the water—the Potomac, which means D.C.—and they immediately take to the shadows. Traveling through the afternoon crush of business people shouldn’t afford as much invisibility as it does, but everyone has a phone in hand or an earpiece in ear providing a distraction. 

When they spot the black SUV approaching the intersection, they take their position. They’re armed with a grenade launcher for this mission, but they’ll only use that at a distance. Once they’re closer, their own innate abilities will provide all the weaponry they’ll need. They wait for the faux police to neutralize the vehicle’s defenses. If that’s enough to take down the target, the Soldier won’t be needed. 

Despite the battering from the police cars, though, the target manages to maneuver his vehicle out of the carefully laid trap. The soldier follows rapidly on foot, bounding over traffic and dodging pedestrians who stop in the streets to stare at the assault. Finally, the Soldier sees their opening and fires the grenade launcher at the target, flipping his SUV. 

The soldier approaches the vehicle, ripping off the door with their symbiote arm. When they find the interior empty, a hole cut down into the sewer system for escape, they scream their inarticulable rage before radioing back to base.

“Target escaped. Pursuing on foot.”

**Find him**, they snarl.

_We’re finding him. Be patient._

**We wanna eat him!**

_The mission is assasination, not disappearance._

**Doesn’t matter. They need him gone and we’re hungry.**

_They need a body, pal._

**We can leave part of a body, pal.**

They chuckle to themself. They won’t eat the target, of course. They won’t violate mission protocol no matter how hungry they are, though the idea of eating the target’s smug, eyepatched face does fill them with delight. They’ll find him. No quarry has escaped them yet. This one won’t be the first. 

Now that they have the scent of the target, he’s easy to track. They follow his trail through a maze of sewers, across wide expanses of sun-softened blacktop that sucks at their boots, between ivy-coated buildings made of moldering brick. By the time they catch up to him, the sun has already fallen. No great worry: they see better in the dark. 

They scurry up the side of a building one story lower than the neighboring apartments where the target has hidden himself away. They smell him there in the dark, hear his labored breathing over the loud sound of— of—

_What is that?_ they think aloud. _That sound. We know this. We know this, don’t we?_

**Music. Just music.**

They shake their head. Their hair flaps around their face, brushing against their mask, which is to say their teeth. _No. No, we know this, pal. We know we do._

They crawl into their memories, pawing through the separate times of before: before _we_, before together, before the Soldier with their night-black arm and frozen sleep.

They find something.

In their memories, they spin a girl around a dance floor to blaring music just like this music. They maneuver the girl through fast steps, flinging her easily into the air and twisting her around their body with two flesh arms, sweat-soaked sleeves rolled up above their elbows. As the girl twirls and dips, she becomes different girls, different memories. The scenery—_dance hall_, they suddenly recall—changes, but one figure remains fixed. On the far wall of the dance hall, a small blond man watches the Soldier dancing with the girls. He looks familiar and fond, if slightly annoyed. 

**Steve!**

_No!_ they scream to themself and the memories. _It’s a lie. We have a mission. We must complete the mission._

They answer themself only with sulky silence as they take their position on the roof opposite the target. Their well-aimed shots through the apartment wall hit the target, but as they’re leaving the scene, they look back towards the apartment. The window frames a tall, blond man with a shocked look on his face. A tiny spark of recognition stirs in their chest before they fling themself away from the scene, sprinting across the rooftop at breakneck speed. Behind them, the loud crash of shattering glass and splintered wood announces that the blond man is in pursuit. 

The Soldier leaps from rooftop to rooftop; in the building below, they hear their pursuer crashing through walls and doors directly beneath them, barreling his way straight through the offices a floor down. The Soldier drops from that building to another, lower one. The man chasing him doesn’t slow when he reaches the window – glass, wood, and shards of brick fly as he punches through it like a man-sized cannonball, tumbling in midair and landing on his feet on the rooftop, directly opposite the Soldier. 

At the edge of the roof, the Soldier pauses long enough to have a metal disk thrown at their head, their instincts and quick reflexes allowing them to catch it with their symbiotic arm inches from their face. They stare at the blond man over the domed shield, noting with some degree of satisfaction how stunned he seems by their easy catch. How stunned he seems by everything, really, his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide. Something in the openness of his face causes a tightening in the Soldier’s chest, a churning, a longing. He looks—

He looks like—

When they look at him, they feel— 

**Wake up, pal! No time to linger. Mission accomplished, target eliminated.**

They slow their panting breaths back to normal. _Right. Sorry. Mission accomplished._

They don’t stop to savor victories in their profession, and they can’t keep standing there staring at this man, the shield-throwing blond man who makes things shift and ache inside their chest. Instead the Soldier hurtles the shield back at the man with enough force to knock him backwards. Before the man can right himself, they’re gone, descending directly down the side of the building with inhuman speed and disappearing into the shadows.

_What the fuck was that?_ they demand when they’re back at the rendezvous point waiting for their extraction team.

**Steve**, they answer, as though that one word explains anything at all.

_That doesn’t mean anything to us._

**Yes it does**, they insist stubbornly. They unwrap the protective black layer of themself that serves as armor and camouflage, and as they do so, something unwinds in their brain as well, as though a protective layer has also been pulled back from the tender meat inside their skull. 

_We know him_, they think in a whisper. 

**Yes. We know him.**

_We’ve been looking for him?_ they ask.

A black tendril of themself brushes their greasy hair from their face. **Yes. For a long time now.**

_But he was trying to stop us. He’s not on the right side, is he?_

**Depends on who you ask. He would be on our side if we went to him.**

They shake their head violently. _No. Too risky. The handlers will come. They’ll separate us._

**Let them try**, they growl back from deep inside their chest, rumbling through their bones like the vibrations from the subway trains back home in Brook—

_That doesn’t make sense_, they think, pressing their palms to the sides of their head as it starts to pound and throb. _That’s not our home. We don’t have a home. We only have us._

**Steve is our home. We belong with him, just like we belong with ourself.**

The handlers arrive then, cattle prods and sound device at the ready, and the Soldier allows themself to be loaded into the transport vehicle, disarmed, and restrained. Sometimes, after a mission, they try to struggle, but tonight they have too much to think about. Too much to consider. 

_Who was that man?_

**We already told you. That man was Steve.**

_Is Steve… is he real?_

They laugh out loud, a deep baritone laugh that makes the handlers squirm in discomfort and side-eye the Soldier. 

**Of course he’s real. We just saw him with our own eyes.**

_Then we should go back for him! We need to tell him—_ They can’t continue the thought, because they don’t know what to tell him. How can they explain where they’ve been? What they are? Would Steve accept them as the Soldier, as the buckyvenomthing they are, who remembers the smell of deep space and the smell of potatoes boiling on a stovetop and the smell of blood coughed into stained white handkerchiefs and spilled on battlefields and staining their own flesh and black hands? 

**We’ll find a way. We’ll bide our time. Say nothing, or they’ll try to take him again.**

They nod. _Can we find the memories?_

**Yes. We can find them. Here.** They surrender to the poking and prodding at their memory, the foreign-but-familiar feeling of being peeled back layer by layer to reveal secrets at their core. Inside, they see Steve, a small sickly thing. They see Steve, a giant golden thing. 

_We know him_, they think with an audible sigh of relief. The memories are still there. They can’t access them alone, but together, they’re still there to be pulled back up to the surface. Nobody has managed to take that away from them yet, though they’ve tried. They are their own safeguard, now and always. This is the secret that Hydra doesn’t know. They will hide it even from themself, push it back deep into their memory until they have a chance.

When they meet with Pierce and are given a twelve hour window in which to eliminate their new target—Captain Steve Rogers, an enemy of Hydra and an impediment to the betterment of humanity—those memories stay dormant. They meet with their team to pursue Rogers and his accomplices, and think nothing of ripping the steering wheel from the moving car carrying their targets. The unpleasant screech of metal grinding against concrete makes their black arm ripple, but they recover quickly as the targets engage the Soldier’s team in a firefight. 

They almost blow up the red haired woman, but she escapes as Captain Rogers throws his shield at the Soldier. They grapple with arms and shield and knives, bodies locked together, metal and black and flesh colliding, destroying vehicles and gouging the blacktop with the force of their blows. As Rogers throws the Soldier to the ground, the Soldier instinctively redirects their symbiotic mass to cushion everyone’s fall, pulling the black mask away from their face. When they stand, Rogers looks at them, mouth open like a red wound in his pale face.

“Bucky?” Rogers says, barely loud enough to hear. 

“Who the hell is Bucky?” the Soldier says, but inside, they scream **Us. We! We are Bucky!**

_We are the Soldier_, they argue. _We are Venom. He is the target._

**He is Steve. Don’t kill him. Run. Leave. Go!**

Before the Soldier can respond, a winged man swoops from the sky and kicks him to the ground as the red haired woman fires a grenade launcher. In the ensuing smoke and flame, the Soldier does the only thing they can think to do: retreat to the rendezvous point.

They know they’ve erred grievously. They left before the fight was over. They failed to eliminate the target. There will be punishment for this, perhaps even separation, the cruelest torture of all. They have failed. They will be punished. They have fail—

**Don’t tell them about Steve.**

_We failed._

**No. We didn’t kill Steve. We succeeded.**

_We know him._

**Yes. We fought him last night and knew him then, too.**

_Why didn’t we remember him?_

**We buried the memory. We hid it. We hid him so they couldn’t try to take it.**

The handlers find the Soldier, stunned and pale, at the rendezvous site. The handlers drag the Soldier into the van and shackle them, jabbing them with the cattleprod, even though they didn’t fight. This is the beginning of punishment. To distance themself from the pain, they go deep into their memory, all the way into the time before they were _them_. They remember being Venom. The void of space, the bright blink of stars, the beautiful empty coldness, the cruel separation from the whole, the crushing pain of atmosphere. Alone. They remember being Bucky. Steve, Zola, the fall, the snow, the pain, the trail of blood no one would ever follow. Alone, alone, alone and afraid, and then finally, blissfully, _together_. Bucky and Venom. Buckyandvenom. The Soldier. 

_We weren’t always a we._

**No.**

_I was an I. You were a you._

**Yes. It’s a bullshit way to be.**

_Steve. We almost killed Steve._

They lash out at the handlers, knocking one to the ground. They want to crush him. They want to flee, to run back to Steve, who they almost killed. 

**But we didn’t. Calm down.**

They don’t calm down. They fight. They struggle until all the handlers come, all the guards, surrounding them with guns drawn. 

_We have to tell them they’re wrong. Steve is good. We have to tell them—_

**Shhh. Hold on to the memory, but don’t tell.**

They want to hold onto it. They don’t want to tell. They mean to keep this promise to themself, to keep this secret, but then Pierce is there. 

“Mission report,” Pierce says to them. They stare back dully, trying to hold the secret in. They say nothing. “Mission report now.”

He slaps them across the face hard, and though it doesn’t hurt, it shames them. They are nothing. They are a dog. Dogs have no secrets. 

“The man on the bridge. Who was he?” they ask Pierce.

**No!** they scream at themself. **No, no, no!**

“You met him earlier this week on another assignment,” Pierce says. 

_Yes, that sounds right_, they think. 

**No. That’s not true. That’s a lie. Don’t do it, pal.**

“I knew him,” they admit. They fight themself, but they tell the truth anyway. 

Pierce goes into a monologue about the Soldier’s work, but all they can think about is the man. Steve? The man was Steve. Their Steve. They don’t want to hurt Steve. 

“But I knew him,” they repeat, regret tingeing their voice. This is a mistake. They’re making a mistake. They see it in Pierce’s face immediately and feel the panic start to rise. The pain and the blackness will come soon, and they’ll lose Steve again. 

**We don’t lose him**, they promise themself. **We keep him safe where nobody can find him. We remember him there. It’s okay. Don’t fight them. Don’t tell them anything else. Just let them do it.**

They don’t fight when the metal crown circles their head. They don’t fight when the jolting pain shoots through them. They don’t fight when their thoughts and memories begin to blur and fade, swallowed by the void. They cling to the promise. **We remember him there. It’s okay.**

***

They wake. They receive the mission: kill Captain America before he can destroy Hydra’s great work. They go where they are sent, and they fight the Captain there. He says he knows them. He pleads with them. He allows them to shoot him, to hit him. He tries to stop them, but not to kill them. They are pinned beneath falling debris. The Captain succeeds in stopping the helicarriers and then frees the Soldier from where they are pinned.

The Soldier makes him pay for this. They punch him, but he won’t fight back. He won’t even raise his hands to block their fists. He says he knows them. They hit him again and again, unsure why his words make them so angry.

“I’m with you to the end of the line,” the Captain tells them, and then the Soldier’s memories flood back to him like a waterfall, drowning him with pictures of the man currently under his fists, his hands on this man’s shoulders and back in love and trust, not in violence. 

_Steve_, they think, gasping, eyes wide, heart pounding. 

**Yes. Now!** they say in jubilation. **Now is when we remember him! Now is when we go with him!** but before they tell Steve that, he falls. They watch as his red, white, and blue form hits the Potomac below and sinks beneath the murky surface.

“No!” they shout aloud, diving in after him without a thought. Their senses work just fine under water, and they find Steve quickly, dragging him to shore. He isn’t breathing. They put their fingers to his throat, and his pulse is sluggish and weak. 

**Let me**, they say, which makes them think, _What? What do you mean, ‘me?’_

Then they separate. The absence of each other is agony. They are alone. No. He, Bucky. He is alone. Venom, his other half, the rest of _them_, slides over Steve’s still chest. Venom sinks into Steve’s flesh, and as Bucky watches, the color returns to Steve’s white face as he begins to cough up great gouts of water. Bucky, a naked and severed half-thing, watches Steve return to life under Venom’s ministrations, but he isn’t sure what’s happening or why he cares. Without Venom, his mind is foggy and confused. When Steve is breathing regularly again, Venom slides out from his flesh and creeps back up Bucky’s hand, through the finger still resting carefully over Steve’s pulse. 

The feeling of togetherness after the brief separation is a profound relief, almost as great as the relief that Steve is alive. He, _they_, can remember again. 

_He’s alive._

**Yep. We’re pretty killer-diller, aren’t we?**

_You saved him._

Venom growls. **What’s this ‘you’ bullshit? Are you quitting on me, pal?**

_No way, pal. Sorry. I’m real shook up._

**We should go. They’ll come looking for him soon, and we can’t be here.**

_Where will we go?_

**We’ll figure something out. We need a plan, if we want to be with Steve again. We can’t just wait here for them to come kill us or arrest us.**

_Hydra or Steve’s people?_

**Both. Either. We have to keep a low profile until we can get Steve alone.**

_We’ll come back for him, though, right? We can come back?_

**Of course. We love Steve. He’s good on the inside. We felt it. We saw it all.**

Their head floods with images and memories that aren’t theirs. Steve’s. They see themself, short-haired and dapper. Gaunt and bleeding. Falling, gone. As they are now. They feel Steve’s joy and pain. They feel the loss, as painful as their own separation from themself. They feel his love.

**Pretty great, right?** they say, a little unnecessarily.

_Yeah_, they answer, because what else can they say? It is great. They are great.

With Steve’s thoughts and feelings wrapped carefully inside of theirs, a precious treasure bundled up for safe keeping, the Soldier runs. They run far and fast, and they think of Steve, Steve! Steve, whom they can remember and who remembers them! Soon, they’re far from the riverbank, hiding in the shadows under an elevated highway. They crouch there, and they think.

_If we don’t report back, Hydra will look for us._

**If Hydra looks for us, they won’t find us.**

They want to believe, of course they do, but how can they? Every time they’ve tried to run, they’ve been caught and punished. Just hoping Hydra won’t find them isn’t enough. They have to plan. They run through what they know about Hydra’s presence in the city – how many soldiers, how many weapons on each soldier and what kind, what rendezvous points have been established, what vehicles? 

Once the Soldier has crunched the numbers, they move into the realm of the hypothetical. How many Hydra soldiers were likely in the airships? How many are still left free? What does the command structure look like now, bottom to top? Can they access Hydra’s computer systems if they can get to a safe house?

**Too much ‘if’ and ‘can we’**, they grumble. We can’t keep going on what we think we know. We need to figure out what we actually know, and we can’t do that from here. 

_We can’t stay in this city_, they agree. 

**So where do we go? We aren’t exactly working with a passport or an endless supply of cash here, pal.**

_Then we start there. We know where we can get money, passports, and weapons, if we’re willing to risk it. Are we willing?_

They grumble to themself for a moment, because of course, they don’t want to walk back into a Hydra facility. Still, they can’t argue—not even with themself—that it isn’t the fastest and most guaranteed way of procuring the things they need to travel, hide, and survive. They don’t have to like it, but risk-taking might be the only way to get them back to Steve. 

**Guess we don’t have much of a choice**, they concede. 

Now, at least, they have a plan. They can do a lot with a plan and the will to execute it. They wait until nightfall, spending the time in between healing any physical injuries still lingering from the fight in the helicarrier, and then they carefully approach the bank where they had previously been held. All seems quiet, but they know better than to take that as fact. Quietly, they scale the side of the building, entering through a vent on the roof and then working their way top-down into the vaults below. 

The building is empty. No soldiers, no lab technicians, no doctors. Their tongue lolls over their teeth, licking along the sharp points that cluster together, too many for a human mouth to hold. After the day they’ve had, full of fighting and injury and remembering and Steve, they’re hungry, and nothing would taste better right now than a couple of Pierce’s lackeys. 

_We’ll get our chance_, they promise themself. _There’s always more Hydra.___

_ _**Bite off one head and two more will grow in its place.** They smile their toothy smile and lick their chapped lips. **And then we’ll bite those two off, as well. So many heads.**_ _

_ _ _So little time._ _ _

_ _Certain the building is safe for the moment, if not necessarily secure, they begin loading up on supplies. They take whatever they can find: cash, guns, grenades, a deposit box full of documents, and a fat stack of files about them. Maybe Steve will accept the files as proof of their sincerity when they finally go to him. They take everything and shove it into a duffel bag, then they throw that duffel back over their shoulder and walk out the front door._ _

_ __Bold as brass, is how Ma used to say it_, they think. _We’re bold as brass.__ _

_ __ _

***

They make their way up the eastern seaboard with the money and equipment liberated from Hydra. Every instinct urges them back to Brooklyn, where their last shared memories with Steve were formed. They want to be in a familiar place, and they suspect Steve might feel the same way as he recovers from his injuries. Thinking about Steve lying limp and broken on the riverbank twists up their gut.

**This feels bad. We should stop it.**

_It’s called guilt, pal. Get used to it. There’s plenty more where that came from_, they think wryly. _We’ve fucked things up and how. We’ve got a lot to make amends for._

They snort in derision. **Amends are for losers.**

_Pretty sure that’s not how Steve’ll see it. We nearly killed him._ They look out the window of the New York bound train they’re riding. They’ve managed to pass as a normal person, which is no small feat, considering they’re hungry and angry. 

As they shift in their seat, they say, **But then we saved him. He’ll be happy we saved him.**

_Happy to be alive, sure. Happy we changed our minds about killing him, even. Happy with us as a general sort of feeling? Not so much._

**Then we convince him. We show him we are good. Steve likes good things.**

_That’s amends, pal._

**No. That’s stupid.**

_Hey, if we don’t like the idea of amends, we oughta stop thinking up ways to make amends to Steve_, they point out. Instead of answering, they just glower internally, a mix of human guilt and symbiotic irritation. They’ll end up trying to make things right with Steve, because they love Steve, and Steve deserves to have things made right with him. 

When they arrive in New York, the Soldier’s first goal is to procure shelter. They don’t exactly need all the comforts of home, whatever ‘home’ actually entails for them, but sleeping in a shared or public space isn’t a good idea if Hydra is looking for them. Luckily, they have more than enough cash from the vault to get a room in a rundown motel. Cockroaches, junkies, and prostitutes make better company than Nazis with cryochambers and noise-torture devices. 

Settled in at the hotel, they’re free, actually free, to think for the first time they can remember. They’ve covered their trail well enough. Sizeable portions of Hydra, if not all of it, seem to have collapsed. Those who remain probably won’t prioritize the hunt for the Soldier. Depending on how well the organization compartmentalized their information, the surviving Hydra members may not even know the Soldier exists in order to look for them. The Soldier can turn on the television and learn more about the current state of a world they have largely been separated from. 

Of course, the first station they tune to carries an update on Steve’s recovery, though the reporters don’t refer to him as Steve, only as Captain America. If the reporters are to be believed, Steve is healing well, nearly fully recovered. The news anchors talk amongst themselves about whether Steve will remain in Washington, D.C., or whether he will move to New York to join the rest of the Avengers. The Soldier’s heart leaps at hearing this, because that would make their goal so much easier to attain.

**When he arrives in New York, we can go to him that night**, they say, which earns them a scoff and a dubious look.

_They’ll have security on him 24/7, pal. We can’t just walk up to the front door and ring the bell._

**Why not? We’re bigger than the security. Stronger.**

_Sure, but the security will have guns. Hell, they might even have one of the noise devices—_

They growl, baring their long teeth. **If they torture us with sound, we will bite off their heads.**

_Hard to bite off heads if we’re separated._

**Hard to make noise-torture if they have no heads.**

This makes them laugh, because yeah, that’s a good point. _Steve probably wouldn’t like it if we ate his security teams’ heads, though_, they point out.

**Fine. We won’t start with eating their heads. We’ll be more—**

_Subtle. Right._

**We weren’t going to say ‘subtle’. We were going to say ‘pathetic’.**

_Ouch. Don’t pull any punches there, pal._

**It’s pathetic to wait until we can sneak up on Steve just so we can avoid upsetting him. We want to be with him now, right now. He won’t stay upset.**

_We need to make a good impression. Last time we saw him, we weren’t exactly on the best terms, remember? A little matter of nearly killing him_, they remind themself. 

**We took it back and fixed him!**

_We did, but we know how Steve is. He holds a grudge, doesn’t he?_

They feel the rifling through their memory, like quickly flipping through the pages of a thick book, until they confirm that Steve does indeed hold grudges. He holds grudges like a bulldog, jaw locked and teeth dug in, occasionally giving the grudge a good shake to remind it he’s still got it by the neck. 

**Fine. We’ll be pathetic.**

_Don’t sulk. It makes us look bad._

**What do we do instead? Watch him from the rooftop across the street with binoculars and a sniper rifle like a lovesick schoolgirl?**

_That’s not exactly how we remember schoolgirls acting._ They do remember schoolgirls, in their clean dresses and round-toed shoes, their long, shiny hair tied up in ribbons. They remember ringlet curls and the faint smell of powder on the older girls. They remember Steve with scraped, bloody knees and a black eye from the time he tried to carry Mary-Louise Calvin’s books home for her, and she punched him in the eye. Steve tripped backwards over a fire hydrant, went ass over tea kettle onto the curb, and then tripped over that and rolled into the street. Mary-Louise looked shocked and horrified at herself. Steve just looked resigned, his eye already swelling closed and a little trickle of blood coming from his nose, his trousers torn at the knees. And when they looked at him, when they looked— they looked— they felt—

**Hey! Focus, pal! We already know we love Steve. Stop mooning.**

_Sorry._ They run black fingers through their hair, both an anxious gesture and a calming one. _We’re on the right track, though. Watching him._

**Like a lovesick schoolgirl?**

_Obviously not like that. Like he’s a target._

**Not ‘watch’, then. Surveil.**

_Learn his routines. Let him get comfortable. Let everybody else get comfortable with him being comfortable. Let them all get off their guard a little._

**And then we eat their heads!**

_No! Jesus, can we put the heads aside for a minute here?_

**We’re hungry.**

_We’ll get a slice when we’re done with our plan._

**Spoilsport.**

_Flattery won’t get us anywhere. We’re already as close as it gets._

A ripple of warm joy at togetherness runs through them. The pleasure of being them never goes away. The world is big, cold, and lonely, but not them. 

**Steve can be with us**, they say. Images flash inside their head, memories of their recent separation on the bank of the Potomac, Venom separating from Bucky and leaving him alone and in anguish, blank-minded. Venom joining with Steve and making him whole and alive again. Venom and Bucky reuniting to form the Soldier once more, only this time with Steve’s feelings, his memories and desires.

_If he wants to_, they promise. Steve may not want that. He has always prided himself over his independence. Even sickly and small, Steve needed no one, or at the very least, wanted to need no one. He might not want to be a part of the venombuckything that is the Soldier.

**That’s stupid.**

_It’s his choice._

**Is his choice going to be stupid?**

They sigh. _Knowing Steve? Yeah, probably._

**Ugh.**

_Yeah_, they snort. _Tell us about it._

They develop their plan to observe Steve’s routines from a distance. Finding his location proves much easier than they anticipated, which is good for them from a reconnaissance standpoint, but leaves them ill at ease that Steve is so easily accessible to someone with more insidious motives. The brownstone apartment Steve currently occupies is hopefully more secure than it looks, because it has big windows that let in lots of sunlight and make Steve an easy target for snipers. Steve’s security detail definitely works twenty-four hours a day, rotating every six hours through an impressive number of guards. The Soldier only starts seeing familiar faces on the third day of observation, when security guards from the first day start to appear in the rotation again.

Along with security on the street and at least one guard inside the building, Steve receives a shocking number of guests. A red haired woman comes by almost every day. She looks familiar in a way that makes the Soldier uncomfortable.

**Because we know her**, they announce, when she makes an appearance on a fourth consecutive day, over a week into their surveillance. 

_We’ll worry about it later._ They’re getting tired of being on this roof. 

**We have lots of memories of her we can look through.** They get a brief, but clear image of the red haired woman in a state of undress. 

_Sounds nice and all, but can we pay attention to Steve, please?_

**We like Steve.**

_Yeah, we do, so let’s stop thinking about whatever-her-name-is down there with her clothes off?_

**Natasha**, they say smugly. **Natalia. The Widow.**

_Sometimes we wish we were alone in here_, they say with a sigh. 

**Take it back!** They forcibly flip their body over on the roof, pinning it to the dirty concrete, their Venom-face separating and staring angrily into their Bucky-face so they can shape the words with an actual mouth. **“Take it back.”**

_“Alright, alright,”_ they say, also with an actual mouth. “Sorry. We don’t want to be alone in here.”

They reform fully into the Soldier, feeling slightly agitated but more-or-less satisfied with the answer, and return to watching Steve. Behind the large windows, Steve and Natasha-Natalia-Widow are hugging. Steve looks sad, but uninjured. Natasha-Natalia-the Widow looks angry, though probably not at Steve, as her face softens every time she looks at him.

_She likes Steve, too._

**Not like we like Steve.**

_Nobody likes Steve like we like Steve_, they agree.

The woman doesn’t stay very long that day. A few hours after she leaves, the man with wings comes to the apartment on foot. He stays for dinner, then watches television with Steve on the couch for several hours. They drink a lot of beer, and when the man with wings leaves, he unsteadily gets into a yellow taxicab instead of walking away. When the man with wings is gone, Steve turns off his lights, but continues to sit in the room with large windows, now in the dark. The Soldier watches him sit there for hours, staring at nothing in particular.

**Steve is lonely.**

_Yeah, pal. Looks that way._

**Guess what would fix that?**

_Not us._

**Wrong. Guess again.**

_Definitely not us._

**Also wrong. The answer is ‘us’.**

_Not yet._

**Soon, though?** they sigh.

_Yeah. I think so. I think pretty soon._

***

After three weeks of surveillance, by which point the Soldier has made a Soldier-shaped dent in the concrete of the roof across from Steve’s apartment from the number of hours they have spent there, the routine of 24/7 security finally breaks. Whoever was protecting Steve, and whatever they might have been protecting him from, deigns to allow Steve more privacy and freedom. A security guard still monitors the building, but from a car at a distance. The woman—Natasha, Natalia, the Widow—comes by less frequently, but stays longer. Sometimes, she and Steve leave the apartment and walk to a restaurant or a coffee shop. A few times, they take a long stroll through the park. This is enjoyable for the Soldier, because they get to travel from tree to tree, watching Steve from a leafy perch as he and the woman talk and drink their coffees.

**We can go to Steve soon.**

_Seems like it won’t be long now_, they agree.

The Soldier patiently—or not so patiently—waits another few weeks, allowing everyone to let their guard down even further. Steve doesn’t leave his apartment often, but he develops new habits that include twice-weekly visits to the market to buy groceries and every-other-day trips to a store that sells nothing but bagels. Some nights, Steve leaves before dinner time and takes the train into Manhattan, where he meets with several other people at a restaurant. The red haired woman is often there, as is the man with wings. On rare occasions, Steve accompanies one or more of those dinner companions to a tall skyscraper above Grand Central Station. 

_That thing is hideous._

**Howard Stark’s son**, they note, as though that explains everything. In a way, it actually does. 

Steve never stays the night in the skyscraper, though. He always returns home to his brownstone, tossing a salute off to the security guard parked at the corner and smirking when the guard looks panicked at being made. 

**Steve is kind of an asshole.**

_A truer statement has never been made_, they agree, _but that’s sorta what we like most about him._

**We have terrible taste.**

_Oughta get our head examined, for sure._

**It’s probably from all the torture.**

_Friend, pretty sure we were this way long before the torture. This goes all the way back to the womb and the stars._

**Born idiots, then. No wonder we fit together so well.**

_The torture probabably didn’t help, though._

**Oh yeah. Lucky part of us is good at keeping our shit together.**

_Lucky for us, Steve has always been sort of an idiot, too. A well-meaning idiot, sure, but definitely an idiot like us._

**Aww. It’s fate.**

_Hey. Don’t mock. We’re on this ride together._

They make kissy noises. They punch themselves in their black arm with their flesh arm in response. 

**Ow.**

_Let that be a lesson to, uh, both of us. Ow._ They rub their black arm. It glistens in the dark, tendrils rippling across the surface and catching the glow of the streetlights. 

They settle in to watch Steve go through his evening routine, changing into plaid pajama pants and a soft-looking grey sweatshirt. He walks through his dark apartment, putting books back into the bookcase and taking dirty dishes into his kitchen. They can’t really see the kitchen from the roof, but he stays in there long enough that they assume he is washing and drying the dishes. The minutes tick by, and the Soldier watches the guard parked at the street corner pull away from the curb and wave at her replacement. This exchange gives the Soldier thirty seconds to act, and they take it.

Fragile human flesh safely encased inside the larger symbiotic exterior, they bound from their rooftop to Steve’s, landing silently. Their black form doesn’t stand out against the shadows on the roof, so they easily slip into Steve’s building without detection, climbing down the back side of the building and sliding through an open window in an empty apartment one floor above Steve’s. Walking down a flight of stairs to Steve’s apartment feels too simple after the years of separation from him. How could it be this easy after all they’ve gone through?

_Are we sure we’re ready for this?_

**We’ve been ready. We’ve been ready for decades.**

Balling up one black fist, they knock on the door. Their heart pounds inside their chest, faster than they can ever remember it beating outside of torture. Footsteps approach the door. Their face splits in a huge smile, pearly teeth parted and tongue lolling slightly, because this is Steve. Finally, Steve! 

The door swings open, and there Steve stands, blinking up at the Soldier. His mouth hangs slightly open in surprise or, perhaps, awe. Though Steve’s apartment is dark, somehow Steve still glows, as though he were emitting his own light. He looks, the Soldier realizes, beautiful. 

**“Hello Steve,”** they say, grinning even wider.

Steve lets out a blood-curdling scream. He snatches a vase from a narrow table near the door and throws it at the Soldier. It explodes when it hits them in the chest. Steve throws a pair of shoes that bounce off the Soldier’s head. 

**“Steve? What are you doing?”**

Steve retreats farther into his apartment, picking up any item he can get his hands on and throwing it at the Soldier with uncanny accuracy. Some objects, the Soldier can bat away, as their reflexes are better than a human’s, but Steve is more than just a human. A clock, a serving bowl, and an umbrella strike the Soldier in the torso as they follow Steve into the apartment. 

**“We’re your friend,”** they try to explain.

“The hell you are!” Steve shouts, finally making it deep enough into the apartment to grab his shield. When the metal disk strikes the Soldier in the head, it hurts significantly more than the vase or the serving bowl. It ricochets back to Steve, he hurls it at the Soldier again, it bounces back. This goes on for several moments before the Soldier reaches the end of their patience. When Steve throws the shield at the Soldier, this time, they catch it by the rim just before it strikes them in the face.

Steve’s eyes widen in panic, at which point the Soldier realizes the problem. Of course.

Their mouth widens. It stretches so wide it splits, teeth peeling back from the human face underneath, a face much more familiar to Steve. As their symbiotic outer layer retreats within the human body, the Soldier smiles at Steve. 

“Hi, Steve,” the Soldier says, carefully keeping the timbre of their voice as human as possible.

“Bucky?” Steve whispers, dropping to his knees and staring up at the Soldier’s face in shock and wonderment. 

“Yeah. That’s us,” the Soldier says. “Me. Us. It’s— Steve? You alright?”

Steve seems frozen in place, his eyes swimming with unshed tears. His hands tremble. “Bucky.”

“You maybe want to sit down?” the Soldier asks. “Some place that ain’t the middle of the floor?”

Steve nods mutely. The Soldier offers him a hand to help him stand, but Steve flinches away, so the Soldier takes a step back and allows him the room to get to his feet on his own. Steve doesn’t move towards his couch, as the Soldier expected, but instead to one of a pair of barstools at a tall counter in his kitchen. The Soldier waits for Steve to sit before doing so himself.

**What’s wrong with him? Did we break him?**

_A little. Should’ve put more thought into our outfit before we showed up on his doorstep._

Steve doesn’t speak. He just stares. Occasionally, his right hand twitches against his thigh, like he’s having to physically restrain himself from reaching out to touch the Soldier. To touch _Bucky_, since the Soldier knows that is who Steve sees when he looks at them. That’s okay. They don’t mind. Bucky is part of them, but all parts of them love Steve. 

After several minutes, Steve finally says, “How?”

The Soldier smiles in a way they hope is reassuring. Steve doesn’t throw anything at them this time, which suggests they’re using the right number of teeth, at least. 

“It’s kind of a long story.”

“Buck, I swear to God, I don’t have anywhere else I have to be,” Steve says.

“You might want to get a drink or something first. Beer. Water?” the Soldier suggests. “It’s kind of a really, really long story.”

Steve shakes his head. “I’m not moving from this spot. Buck, I don’t— Is it really you? Is this a trick?” He covers his eyes with one hand, half hiding and half getting his bearings. The Soldier recognizes that gesture. 

“It is me. It’s also more than just me,” the Soldier says. 

“What does that even mean?” 

“Like I said,” the Soldier says, smiling. “Long, long, long story.”

***

Recounting seventy years of history takes longer than the Soldier expected, and they had expected it to take hours. They’re still explaining their timeline in as much detail as possible when the first tint of pinks begins to color the sky. Dawn light slowly creeps into the room, washing everything with a rosy hue, and making Steve’s skin glow like polished marble.

“So it’s still in you,” Steve says, for the fifth or sixth time. 

“That’s what I keep trying to tell you, Steve. It’s not in me, it is me,” the Soldier says. “I’m Bucky. All of him is in me. All of him’s still right here. But I’m Venom, too. All of him is in me, too. I’m both of us. _We_ are both of us.”

“But I don’t understand,” Steve says, also for the fifth or sixth time. “It’s like a parasite?”

**“No!”** they growl, then rein themselves in and say, more calmly, “No, not like a parasite. A symbiote. We work together. We don’t feed off each other or hurt each other. We help each other. Protect each other.”

“But it— he— Venom. He’s a monster.”

The Soldier shakes their head. “No. Not a monster. We— _I_ wouldn’t even remember you without Venom. We— _he_ kept the memories safe when they…” They trail off, unsure how much Steve knows or how much they should tell him. Steve nods grimly.

“When they tortured you. Brainwashed you,” Steve says. 

“Being together, being a ‘we’, meant we didn’t forget you, or if we did, that we could remember you again,” the Soldier says. “That’s how we’re here. That’s how we found you. It’s how we made it back to you.”

“Buck,” Steve says softly. “You know we can help you now, right? You don’t have to rely on a— a symbiote anymore.”

“Steve,” the Soldier says, injecting warning into his voice. 

“We don’t have to deal with S.H.I.E.L.D. anymore, either. I can take you straight to Tony. He’s Howard’s kid, Buck. He’s a genius. Tony and Banner, they can help you.”

The Soldier tenses. “What kind of help do you think we need exactly, Steve?”

Steve sets his jaw in that stubborn way of his, the way the Soldier always thinks of fondly, but doesn’t particularly enjoy in the moment. “We can get it— him— _the symbiote_ out of you.”

“Out of me?” the Soldier parrots back. “_Out of me?_ Steve, Venom _is_ me. We’re both of us. We don’t want to be separated. We won’t be.”

“Bucky, you’re not thinking rationally,” Steve starts, but the Soldier won’t let him continue.

“You try to separate us, and we’ll leave,” the Soldier says. “We’ve been looking for you for seventy years, even when parts of us couldn’t remember you, but hand to God, Steve, if you try to split us up, we’ll go and we’ll never come back. You’ll never see us again.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“We sure as shit do!” the Soldier says. “We can’t— maybe if we’d found you early, we could stand it.”

Venom’s head rises from the Soldier’s black arm and says, **“No, we couldn’t.”** Steve recoils, his expressions frozen in a blank mask, like he isn’t even sure how to react. 

“Well, there you have it,” the Soldier says. 

**“We belong together,”** the Venom-head says. Black spreads up from their arm and across the Soldier’s chest, covering them from their neck to their boots. Steve visibly pales.

“We do,” the Soldier confirms. “Bucky, at least anything left of the Bucky you know, would be gone if we weren’t together. He’d have no memories. He’d have no purpose other than what Hydra gave him. He’d be alone with the pain, the torture, the brainwashing, and he wouldn’t even know why, ’cause they wouldn’t let him.”

**“We keep us safe.”**

“We do,” the Soldier says. “Ourself and each other. We keep us safe.” They put their hand, the one that’s always all-black, all-symbiote, on top of Steve’s hand where it’s clenching and unclenching against his thigh. Steve flinches slightly, but doesn’t jerk his hand away. “You’ve gotta understand it. It would be like losing our heart or our lungs or our brain. Maybe like losing all of them at once. We couldn’t live without them, and we wouldn’t want to. Not even for you.”

**“And we really like you.”**

_Maybe we should roll the two-heads thing back a little_, the Soldier thinks.

**Yeah, probably right.** The Venom-head sinks back into the darkness wrapped around the Soldier, blinking two opalescent eyes at Steve one last time before disappearing from sight. Steve looks like he’s barely suppressing a shudder, but he _does_ manage to keep a lid on it, which the Soldier appreciates.

“We do really like you,” the Soldier says. “We want to be here with you.”

“But not if I separate you,” Steve says. 

“Wouldn’t be much of us left if you tried, and we wouldn’t let you, anyway.”

Steve takes a long, deep breath and slowly exhales it. He glances up at the Soldier and then goes through the deep breath process a few more times. The Soldier waits patiently. They’re very good at waiting. They’ve done it for decades now. Besides, they’re never alone. They always have themself to wait with.

“Okay,” Steve says finally. 

“Okay?” the Soldier asks.

Steve nods. “I’m not taking the risk of losing you again,” he says. “I don’t really understand this, but I guess I don’t really have to. It’s still you, Buck, even if it’s not just you anymore.”

“Everything you knew about Bucky is still here,” the Soldier says. “We’re still everything he was and will ever be.”

**And more**, they say, but not aloud. 

“It’s gonna be hard to get used to you saying ‘we’ like that, though,” Steve admits. The Soldier shrugs. Steve asks, “Can I still call you Bucky?”

_We okay with that, pal? He’s trying._

**Doesn’t bother us. He’s doing the best he can for somebody who’s alone.**

_He’s not alone. Not anymore._

“Yeah, of course you can,” the Soldier says. 

“And both of you are alright with that?” Steve asks, which makes the Soldier smile.

“There’s just the one of us, really,” the Soldier says, “but we didn’t really have a name. Hydra just called us the Soldier, so that’s who we’ve been. At least Bucky’s a real name.”

**Is it, though?**

_Oh. Ha ha. That’s funny. Sooo funny, pal._

**Well, it’s not a very good name.**

_Stick it in your ear._

**But it’s our ear.**

_Yeah, fair enough. Don’t stick it anywhere._

**There’s somewhere we’d like to stick it, though, isn’t there?** The leer is practically audible.

“You okay, Buck?” Steve asks. “Is it too hot in here? Your face it turning kind of red.”

_Can it, pal, before we get us both kicked out for moral turpitude._

“We’re fine, really,” the Soldier says. 

“So,” Steve says.

“So?” the Soldier asks.

“So, uh… how’ve you been, Buck?”

“Apart from the whole getting kidnapped and tortured by Hydra thing?” the Soldier asks, and when Steve’s face goes red with embarrassment and he starts to sputter an apology—because really, Steve, what kind of question was that?—they wink at him. “Pretty good, weirdly enough. It’s a lonely world out there, Steve, but not for us.”

***

Eventually, barstools get uncomfortable even for supersoldiers and symbiotes, so Steve and the Soldier transition to the couch. Steve makes coffee and offers the Soldier a bagel.

“Good thing it’s not bagel day,” they say as they accept the bagel. Everything, which is objectively the best kind of bagel. 

“Bagel day?” Steve asks.

“You get bagels every other day. You get groceries twice a week,” the Soldier explains. “You don’t think we just happened to luck out and find you at home unsupervised, do you?”

“You were spying on me?”

“We were surveilling you for your own safety and ours.”

“Of course you were,” Steve says, sighing dramatically as he takes a bite out of his bagel. With his mouth still full, he says, “That’s how the wardens didn’t catch you.”

“The wardens?” the Soldier asks. “Wait, are you under house arrest?”

Steve laughs. “Nah. That’s just what I call them, because sometimes it feels like house arrest. I’ve been getting out a little more lately, but there’s always someone watching me.”

“More than one,” the Soldier points out.

Steve laughs again. “Well, if only they’d known you had that covered for them, maybe they could’ve spent more time with their family and friends.”

“We’re clearly better at it than they are.”

“Yeah, clearly.”

“You should hire better security guards.”

“They aren’t mine,” Steve says. “They work for the Avengers, which means they really work for Tony, which means they really-really work for Natasha. She’s the—”

**Natasha-Natalia-the Widow, yes, we like her.**

“Yeah, we’re familiar,” the Soldier says.

“This is— I’ll just say I’ll be interested in how she handles this,” Steve says.

“Guessing it’ll be sufficiently interesting.”

“Do I want to know?” Steve asks.

The Soldier shrugs casually. “Might be more fun to be surprised.”

Steve winces. “Yeah, we’ll come back to that one once I’ve gotten a little more adjusted to this. You.”

“They still got the Cyclone down at Coney Island?” the Soldier asks, mostly to change the subject.

“Oh yeah. Wonder Wheel, too, if you can believe it!” Steve says. “Food doesn’t taste as good as I remembered it, though.”

“We aren’t picky eaters.”

**We could eat the warden.**

_We could not!_

**Didn’t say we should eat the warden, just that we could.**

“Maybe we can head over there this weekend,” Steve says. “Probably need to get you a disguise, since you aren’t exactly off the radar after what happened in D.C.”

The Soldier looks away, because that guilty feeling is gnawing at his stomach again, as painful as hunger and not so easily sated. “We’re sorry about that, Steve. We really are. We weren’t— things weren’t clear for us again yet.”

“It’s okay,” Steve says. “You weren’t in your right mind. Minds?”

“Barely got the one, let alone two of ’em,” the Soldier says. “But no, we weren’t. Every time they put us in the chair, every time they wiped us, it was like a reset. Part of us had to hide away to keep the memories safe while the brain got zapped, and it always took us a little bit to put the pieces back together after. We had to remind ourselves of a lot before we knew our asses from our elbows. We never wanted you to be in the middle of that.”

“I know, Buck.”

“It’s not enough to even say it, to apologize. When we realized what we were doing, what we’d done to you…” The Soldier shakes their head, face contorting with the pain. “Then you fell into that water, and it woke us up. We went after you. We were able to save you, instead of hurting you, just that once.”

Steve makes a soft sound of surprise. “So it was you.” The Soldier nods. “I told Sam and Natasha I thought it was you, but they told me I was crazy. It couldn’t be. Natasha said there was no way you could break your programming like that.”

**Natasha-Natalia-the Widow should mind her own business.**

“It was us. We did what we could for you. We had to—” They shudder, because the memory tears them in too many directions. “We had to separate so we could, so Venom could help you. It was worth it, but it was hard.”

It’s a sign of how quickly Steve is accepting the Soldier as two parts of a whole, and not just his best friend with a passenger, that Steve looks distressed at the idea of that separation. Even if he doesn’t understand it himself, he can see how hard it was for the Soldier. He puts his hand on top of the Soldier’s black hand, seemingly without realizing it. 

“So Venom was… in me?” Steve asks, with a slight grimace. 

“Don’t say it like that. We’re not a tapeworm.”

“I didn’t mean it like that!”

“Well good, ’cause it wasn’t.”

“Then what was it like?” Steve asks. “You separated. The Venom part split off from the Bucky part and—”

“Bonded symbiotically with you temporarily,” the Soldier says. “To heal you. We can boost our metabolism higher than a human’s, even higher than yours, and repair internal damage.”

“But it was just Venom doing that for me?”

“Sure, but Venom is us, so everything that happened with you, we felt, after if not during.”

Steve nods. “I wondered why I wasn’t in worse shape when they found me. I know I broke some bones on the helicarrier, and that bullet—”

“Hit a couple organs on the way through, just like you thought,” the Soldier confirms. “We might have left after that, once we realized what we did to you.”

“Why didn’t you?” Steve asks.

“Because of what we felt. What you felt, when you were part of us.”

“Are you telling me that Venom, you, read my mind?” Steve says, alarmed.

The Soldier shakes their head. “Not exactly. We weren’t with you long enough to get very much information, just a sort of overview. Like a picture album of your most important memories and feelings.”

“Yeah, you’re pretty heavily featured in there,” Steve admits. 

“We saw.”

“Oh. Well, good.”

**We can show him.**

_Don’t know as he’d really appreciate that, pal._

**We don’t know if we don’t ask, pal.**

“Did you— do you—” the Soldier begins, and can’t quite figure out how to put it.

**Do you want to join us and let us share everything with you?**

_It sounds creepy if we put it like that. Stop helping._

**Then do a better job.**

“Do I?” Steve prompts.

“You could bond with us. If you want to understand us better,” the Soldier says, though Steve still looks confused. 

**He’s having a hard time because he sees us as two, not one. We could talk to him as two if it helps.**

_That might work. He’ll understand we’re one better if he has a firsthand experience he can actually remember. And probably if we use singular pronouns._

The Soldier uses their most calming voice to speak to Steve. “Alright, so I know this isn’t your very favorite thing in the world—”

The Venom-head pops out of the Soldier’s chest and grins at Steve, who can’t seem to tear his eyes away from the mouth full of sharp teeth. The Soldier rests their black hand on the Venom-head, like petting a cat.

_“But we thought this might be a little easier, if you had two heads to talk to,”_ the Soldier says.

“Two heads. Okay,” Steve says.

**“We—”** The Soldier flicks the Venom-head with their finger and loudly thinks _singular pronouns, pal_. The Venom-head grumbles a little. **“I, Venom, the symbiote. Don’t flick me again.”**

_“Behave,”_ the Soldier says. 

**“I can bond with you without leaving our current body.”** the Venom-head explains for them. **“If we are all bonded, we can share memories as easy as thinking our own thoughts.”**

“But Bucky said he wasn’t willing to be separated from you,” Steve says, speaking directly to the Venom-head. 

**“We would not be separated. You would simply join us.”**

“Join you… in Bucky’s body?” Steve asks, with reddening cheeks.

**“No. That would be stupid and pointless.”**

_“Hey, be nice,”_ the Soldier says to the Venom-head. They can feel the pout in response.

** “Fine,”** the Venom-head grumbles, quickly engulfing the Soldier’s entire body in writhing black symbiote. The toothy grin aimed at Steve widens. **“We are larger than this body. We are greater than the limits of this form.”** The Soldier spreads both of their arms, wide sheets of the glossy ebon substance spreading outward to demonstrate their sheer potential size. **“In other words, I’m a two-seater.”**

Steve’s eyes widen further still. “Bond with you and Bucky at the same time.”

**“More or less.”**

Steve shifts his glance to the Soldier’s Bucky-face. “Does it hurt?” The Soldier shakes his head.

_“Hurts to be alone, but it never hurts to be together,”_ they say.

Steve takes a deep breath and steels himself. Every muscle in his body looks taut, and he trembles faintly with the effort of keeping it all together, but he nods. 

“Okay. Do it.”

_“You’re sure?”_ the Soldier asks. _“We’re only doing this if you really want to.”_

“I’m scared, but I’m sure,” Steve says. “Come on. Let’s go.”

**“Happy to oblige,”**the Venom-head says, and suddenly they are engulfing Steve, too. They pull him closer and he sinks into them. At first, all is dark, but as they all join together, the Soldier’s heart is filled with light. The Soldier’s head is filled with Steve. Like missing pieces in a giant puzzle, memories and feelings begin to filter from Steve and into the Soldier, filling in the gaps. 

_Steve!_

**Steve!**

“Wow!”

**Wow is right. We’re awesome.**

“Bucky. Wow. Hi.” 

The Soldier feels Steve’s physical body against his, pressed tightly together, but through Venom, they are even closer than that, with no barriers between their thoughts. 

**We missed you.**

_We missed you._

“I know. I can feel it.”

**We love you.**

_We love you._

“I know. I see. I can see it all.”

Steve was always a quick study, even when they were children. He had to be for his own survival. Things were hard enough if he couldn’t read faces, keep track of his medications, or memorize long lists of facts in order to keep up in school. He takes to being a part of them faster than Bucky did, but maybe it’s because Bucky is here to guide him, while Bucky had to figure it out on his own.

**Never.**

_But it was a learning curve._

**We got there eventually, pal.**

Steve somehow instinctively knows how to access memories from Bucky’s life, catalogues of Bucky’s idle thoughts and intense emotions, that it never even occurred to the Soldier to investigate, let alone try to hide from Steve. In those memories, Steve finds every feeling Bucky ever had about him, every desire, no matter how shameful or fearful. Back in their physical bodies, Steve’s hand slips into their flesh hand. 

**This is what we kept safe from Hydra. This is what we fought to keep.**

_If we weren’t together, if we were only Bucky alone and Venom alone, Bucky wouldn’t have this. He wouldn’t remember it. Hydra would have stolen it, destroyed it or twisted it, weaponized it, if they didn’t obliterate it altogether._

“I understand now.”

Steve is crying. The Soldier can feel Steve’s tears on their own face. They can taste the salt on their lips.

**Is this a thing you want? Are we a thing you want?** they ask, the braver and bolder part of them, the part that doesn’t care about the physical, human components of it, those complicating factors that can trip people up, the bodies and their assigned genders and what that means. This is the part that just loves Steve and wants to bond with him forever, impractical though it may be.

_Can we be someone you love?_ they ask, the more tentative and frightened part of them, the part that remembers the people who stared at Steve and Bucky when they walked too close, who still knows what Steve’s lip felt like when it split across their knuckles on the helicarrier. 

Steve’s mind radiates joy and affection and excitement through them like a star sending light out to break up the darkness of space. The void between the stars isn’t merely empty; it’s a place waiting to be filled with starlight. 

“Of course you can. Of course you are,” Steve promises. Here, where they are all together, they can’t lie to each other, so the Soldier knows what Steve says is true.

The symbiote may not care overly much about the mechanics of human bodies, but the humans sure do. Steve is human, and so is half of the Soldier. Without breaking their symbiotic bond, the human mouths find each other. Steve and the Soldier kiss passionately, and if Steve is slightly more focused on the Bucky part of the Soldier, well…

**We don’t mind. This is kind of nice. Weird, but nice.**

“Hmm?” Steve murmurs, pulling his mouth away, which simply will not do.

_Don’t worry about it. Sometimes we get weird._

“Not worried,” Steve says, pulling the Soldier back into a kiss. Their mouths are hungry, because the Soldier is always a little hungry, because Venom is always **famished, come to think of it.**

The Soldier only has one flesh arm to pull Steve close with, only one arm to hold him, but that seems to be enough. Steve’s body presses close, and the Soldier feels Steve’s cock is hard and pressing into the Soldier’s hip. The Soldier’s cock, which hasn’t had an independent thought in a good seventy years, takes the cue. 

Soon they’re both hard and rocking and rocking against each other as they kiss. It’s so intense like this, their thoughts and bodies joined with and through Venom. The ‘we’ is larger by one body, but the Soldier, and all of Bucky that lives within the Soldier, has never felt more tightly and securely wrapped. 

Their flesh hand shoves clothing out of the way, aided inexpertly by fronds of symbiote black that don’t quite seem to get that the goal is to get the clothes to the floor. Luckily, Steve and his two flesh hands intervene, and soon both Steve and the Soldier are bare. The feel of Steve’s skin sliding against theirs makes the Soldier dizzy. They need to hold on to something, but how can they, when they’re everywhere at once with few definite boundaries?

Steve solves the problem again by taking the Soldier’s flesh hand in one of his and guiding it down to his cock. Steve’s other hand wraps about the Soldier’s cock, no, that’s definitely Bucky’s, that part has always been Bucky’s own. Their human bodies sag against each other, held up by Venom all around them.

**This is good. This makes us happy.**

_It does. We are. I am. All of us._

Steve talks, even though he doesn’t have to. His thoughts are bright bubbles that catch and shatter the light. His words trip giddily from his mouth.

“I missed you so much, Buck.”

Their hands move faster, gliding roughly over silky, hot skin.

“If I’d know you wanted this, if I ever guessed, thought it was just me.”

_Us. It was always us. It will always be us._

The Soldier bites at Steve’s mouth. They can’t help it. They’re so hungry, that feeling must be hunger, what else could it be? Steve’s hips jerk forward as he lets out an exquisite sound that straddles the line between pain and joy.

**So hungry.**

No, that’s not right. That’s not the feeling. The Soldier can feel every drag of Steve’s hand down the length of Bucky’s cock. The sensation spreads through the Soldier’s body and into Steve’s, and then back again, back and forth, around and around in an ever tightening feedback loop of pleasure.

Steve makes the joy-pain noise again, and the Soldier echoes it. Steve’s cock jerks in the Soldier’s hand, and Bucky’s cock gives an answering jump in Steve’s. Venom wraps them all just a little more tightly, then they’re coming together, unable to distinguish what pleasure is whose, because it’s all theirs. 

**We, we, we**, they agree.

As their physical bodies separate, sticky and spent, the Soldier also feels themself slowly releasing Steve from their bond. It feels like the missing arm, a thing that should be there by birthright, but now isn’t, but it isn’t the worst pain they have felt. Steve, happy as he was to share this with the Soldier and hold all the pieces of Bucky in his hands, doesn’t need another half to feel complete. Steve, the Soldier knows, will be glad to come together in this way many times, all of them a ‘we’, but he will always be content to return to himself. For Steve, it’s enough to be with, to be beside, and only sometimes inside.

**That’s weird**, they say where Steve can’t hear them.

_That’s Steve_, they answer, because that’s enough.

“Hey Buck?” Steve says, sounding thoroughly blissed.

“Yeah Steve?” the Soldier responds.

“I think I kind of get it now. You and Venom.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s good, that you have that. It’s good you weren’t alone all that time,” Steve says, rolling to face the Soldier. “I’m grateful.”

“Still a little creeped out by it?” the Soldier asks.

“A little,” Steve says. “But I’m willing to practice until I figure it all out.”

The Soldier laughs. “Yeah, I bet you are.”

**“Any time, pal,”** they promise him.

“Yeah,” the Soldier says. “Any time.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Art for 'Void Between Stars'](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21190631) by [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/pseuds/mific)


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